We’ve just launched a new website for SalesTaxDataLINK, a financial software company in Bentonville, Arkansas. You can see the new website at left (or click to visit the live site), and the old one below right.
The old and the new websites have a lot in common. Both were built to be visually compatible with the software’s user interface. Users of the software enter their dashboard from the website, so it’s important to keep the look and feel similar enough to make the transition comfortable.
Both are designed to appeal to sales tax compliance professionals: corporate accountants and CPAs. Both carry the basic message that the software is easy, robust, and designed by accountants. The new design has a more modern look — it was time to update the look in any case — but the concept is not completely different.
The site owners wanted a site that would spotlight their product better, though. We started by adding screenshots of the software. First, you can see main screens in the sliding gallery at the bottom right corner of the new screenshot. Then, when visitors click through, they see additional screenshots for each product with descriptions of the process of using the software.
The result is to give a clearer idea of the features and benefits of the software. We continued with the object of clarity by using simpler, livelier, more direct language. There was a bit of negotiation involved, since accountants are a specialized audience, but we’re going to keep an eye on the analytics and make sure that the text is doing its job over the next couple of weeks.
The owners also want to offer plenty of useful information to serve their customers better. Since clients sign in through the website, adding more informational content increases the value of the website to current subscribers.
We moved the site from Joomla to a WordPress platform to make it easier for the site owner to work with, and added a blog which currently gives good, authoritative information about sales tax and will, in the future, be able to offer support for users of the software. Tweaking the content in response to the data we discover will be fast and easy.
We installed Edit Flow, a nice content collaboration plugin, so that our bloggers could work closely with the site owners and provide an editorial calendar as well as handy oversight to make sure we don’t make any mistakes in our discussions of the knotty accounting questions covered in the blog. A blog can make a serious difference in traffic and leads, so this is an important change.
We also integrated social media better. This website is in a very competitive space, and will need social media to help drive traffic along with search.
In all, the new site is an attractive, friendly source of information for the company’s target audience.
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